“[O]ne cannot abstract from the
historical situation of the nation or attack the cultural identity of the
people. Consequently, one cannot passively accept, still less actively support,
groups which by force or by the manipulation of public opinion take over the
State apparatus and unjustly impose on the collectivity an imported ideology
contrary to the culture of the people.”

 Instruction on Christian
Freedom and Liberation, Congregation
for the Doctrine of the Faith

Clearly it is not science but
rather scientism which is central to the society depicted in Aldous Huxley’s
1931 science fiction classic, Brave New World. Toward the end of this dystopian novel about
a hedonistic global order comprised of shallow, self-absorbed clones, one
member of the ruling elite admits that he and his fellow rulers are deeply
suspicious of any sort of intellectual exploration. “Science is dangerous,” explains the World
Controller, “we have to keep it most carefully chained and muzzled.” True, the
elite constantly bombards its biomanufactured subjects with propaganda about
scientific achievements, yet what slogans like “Science Is Everything” actually
refer to is not science as traditionally understood but a kind of god, an
absolute authority figure which demands unquestioning obedience to the status
quo in exchange for the creature comforts of advanced technology. Science as the pursuit of truth has long
since been banished by the soft-totalitarian global government, since such
truth might provoke reflection about the ultimate nature of the cosmos and
thereby destabilize society.

I found myself recalling all this
as I read James Kalb’snew book, Against
Inclusiveness: How the Diversity Regime is Flattening America and the West and
What to Do About It (Angelico
Press, 2013). A timely,
incisive work, Against Inclusiveness builds upon themes introduced in
Kalb’s previous work, The Tyranny of Liberalism, and presents a precise,
methodical examination of the real-life dystopia we inhabit. “[S]cientism and postmodernism go together,”
Kalb observes, “and the two can exist independently of actual science.” The rationalist who denies the soul, the
deconstructionist who denies the ability to know anything at all, and the
globalist who denies national identity are all working together to dehumanize
the planet, as it turns out:

In effect
scientism tells us that there are no transcendent goods, just desires, that
there are no essences of things that we should respect, and that the world is
what we make of it. From this it follows
that the rational approach to politics, social life, and morality is to treat
the world as a resource and turn the social order into a kind of machine for
giving people in equal measure whatever they happen to want, as long as what
they want fits the smooth working of the machine.

Human beings themselves become
mere cogs, continues Kalb. “To demand inclusiveness is to demand that these
human components be distinguished only by reference to the demands of the
machine and otherwise be treated as interchangeable.”

Neutral though the social machine
purports to be, it inevitably exhibits de facto preferences. Those motivated solely by individualistic
appetites for “career, consumption, and diversion” fit the machine’s operation
far more neatly than do those trying to live by complex and demanding
traditions. In the short run, at least,
it is much simpler to satisfy the self-absorbed hedonist of a brave new world
than the man with deep attachments to a religion, family, homeland, and
culture. From the point of view of the globalist technocrat, the desire for stuff
is much simpler to satisfy than the desire for a particular way of life lived
in a particular community.

Upon closer inspection even the
technocrat’s supposed enthusiasm for efficiency and empiricism proves phony;
whenever new evidence casts doubt on the feasibility of the hallowed liberal
paradigm, both efficiency and empiricism go straight out the window. Data suggesting affirmative action policies
have lowered educational standardsand even harmed their intended beneficiariesare rarely aired before the
public. Feverish witch-hunts directed
against former Harvard president Lawrence Summers and eminent scientist James
Watson suggest that the left’s reputation for thoughtful, civil, and rational
discourse is more than a little exaggerated.
Nor did the slaying of more than a dozen soldiers by US Army officer and
openly militant Muslim Nidal Hassan inspire serious, high-level reflection
about the practical impact of political correctness on American military
policy. No, to the contrary, the Army Chief of Staff saw in the massacre an
opportunity to reiterate his quasi-religious devotion to diversity as a sacred
end unto itself.

It is the enlightened egalitarian
progressive who most earnestly wages a “war on science,” argues Kalb, and that
war is but part of a broader campaign to ensure anyone and everyone is able to
feel at home anywhere and everywhere.
This absurd quest translates into the abolition of home as such:

In fact
inclusiveness destroys community by reducing the importance of personal ties,
making us interchangeable with others and making our goals as much a matter of
individual choice as possible. There is
nothing special to distinguish shoppers at a shopping mall from each other, so
there are no divisions among them. They
do not constitute a community, however, because there is nothing that brings
them together other than a common interest in acquiring consumer goods. Each has come for his own purposes. They have very few positive duties toward
each other and they could just as easily be somewhere else, if they found some
minor advantage in doing so.

The only people who belong in the
godless and nationless unity envisaged by John Lennon’s “Imagine,” then, are
narcissistic consumers.

Part of the problem today, Kalb
contends, is that a great many Christians have been duped into taking
inclusiveness for the quintessence of Christian ethics. To the contrary, progressive Christianity is
little more than “poeticized liberalism,” and the contemporary tendency to
conflate the Gospel with liberal inclusiveness is a distortion resembling the
subservience too many English churchmen offered to Henry VIII. The Apostle Paul, Saint Thomas Aquinas, and
various popes seem to be on Kalb’s side here: Pius XII, for instance, tells us
that “[t]here exists an order, established by God, which requires a more
intense love and a preferential good done to those people that are joined to us
by special ties,” while Bl. John Paul II speaks of spiritual gifts we receive
via our history, our culture, and “the national community to which we belong.”

Kalb believes such statements to
be both important and grievously overlooked.
They imply, after all, that no one genuinely concerned with man and his
soul can embrace inclusiveness as now understood:

If
particular cultures and national communities have such importance for the way
we become human and connect to God, then an understanding of diversity and
inclusion that abolishes legitimate boundaries between them and so makes them
nonfunctional cannot be acceptable, and multiculturalism, which deprives every
culture of any setting of its own in which it can function as authoritative,
must be wrong.

By no means does this review
exhaust the topics addressed by Against Inclusiveness, for as brief as
the book is, it succeeds in carefully exploring and connecting an astonishing
variety of issues. Why is modern man so
obsessed with being cool, and for that matter what is “coolness”? Might liberalism tend to promote the very
hatred and divisiveness it claims to suppress?
How are the conceptions of rationality held by Cardinal Newman and
Blaise Pascal critical for any attempt to improve how we think about God, the
world, and ourselves? By asking provocative questions such as these Kalb and
other authors and thinkers strive to revive the moral framework of the West, to
recover the only vision potent enough to supplant a stale liberal orthodoxy
that has long since outlived its usefulness.

Hopefully books like Against
Inclusiveness are just the beginning. Our civilization will pull out of its
downward spiral into dystopia only if more men dare to stand up and ask
politically-incorrect questions of their own.

Against
Inclusiveness: How the Diversity Regime is
Flattening America and the West and What to Do About It
By James Kalb
Angelico Press, 2013
Paperback
216 pages

About the Author

Jerry Salyer

Catholic convert Jerry Salyer is a philosophy instructor living in Franklin County, Kentucky.

All comments posted at Catholic World Report are moderated. While vigorous debate is welcome and encouraged, please note that in the interest of maintaining a civilized and helpful level of discussion, comments containing obscene language or personal attacks—or those that are deemed by the editors to be needlessly combative and inflammatory—will not be published. Thank you.